Kepler will have its eye on thousands of planets and stars in the Milky Way galaxy and will mainly search for planets similar to Earth. The telescope that has been named after the famous German astronomer Johannes Kepler will be launched into Space on the back of a Delta II rocket. Hopefully, it will find planets that are earth-like, meaning that they are rocky planets that orbit sun-like stars in a warm zone whit liquid water on their surface.

 

The Kepler telescope will be launched from launch complex 17B at Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida with the help of the Delta II rocket. The mission that will launch at exactly 10.49 pm EST cost NASA $600 million. 

 

The telescope will help the space agency answer questions such as how many earth-like habitable planets are out there. The approximately 300 planets that orbiting other starts that NASA knows about are larger than earth and are not habitable. Most of those 300 planets are gas giants with characteristics similar to Jupiter and Neptune.

 

Kepler’s eye will cover an area that contains as many as 100,000 stars similar to our sun. In order to trace its targets, the telescope’s eye will use special detectors similar to those used in digital cameras. The telescope’s position in space will work in its advantage as it will be able to monitor the same stars constantly, a thing of which observatories such as Hubble aren’t capable of. 

 

The Kepler will identify those planets by monitoring the planets that pass between the telescope and a star. If a planet passes frequently between Kepler and a star, it means a new planet has been discovered. The Kepler telescope is capable of monitoring the variations in the brightness of more than 100,000 stars every 30 minutes. 

 

"When a planet goes across a star, it blocks some light. The bigger the planet, the more light it blocks, so we get the size of the planet from the size of the dimming" said William Borucki, principal investigator for Kepler science of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

 

The telescope has a 0.95-meter diameter and an array of 42 charge-coupled devices. Its light detectors add up about 95 million pixels (95 megapixels). NASA scientists believe the distance where Kepler might locate its targets will range from 600 to 3000 light years away.

 

NASA officials are confident that the Kepler telescope will “push back the boundaries of the unknown in our patch of the Milky Way galaxy,” as Jon Morse, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division at the agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C., put it.